CSR in Comparison. Institutional Determinants of Mirroring, Substitution and Irresponsibility

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a ubiquitous new form of private governance. A key issue is how CSR initiatives by firms relate to traditional governance institutions, such as state regulation and social partnership. This paper discusses cross-country patterns of corporate responsibility with an interface to the literature on comparative capitalism, and explores how corporate responsibility mirrors or substitutes for institutionalized forms of coordination. The paper uses a statistical analysis of listed corporations in 24 OECD countries during the years 2008 – 2014. We apply a more disaggregated view on the institutional context beyond a pure differentiation between LMEs and CMEs. This seems especially appropriate due to the inconclusive results of former studies and institutional differences in similar countries and various political shifts in the recent years discussed in the more recent literature on comparative capitalism. Moreover, we differentiate in our analysis between corporate responsibility and irresponsibility. The results show that corporate responsibility both mirrors institutionalized forms of business coordination, as well as substitutes for the absence of coordination depending on the institutional arena under observation. Moreover, the paper examines differences in the quality of CSR across institutions and questions the assumption of functional equivalence.